That's when they turn their back and scribble on a sheet of paper.
"Everything the GM says is right even when they contradict previous declarations."

Heh. My default answer is: "We'll chat about it after the session is over." And then: "It accurately models the setting you are playing in to gameable levels of precision. The desired result is _foo. Did you have a better way to achieve the effect?"

Heh. My default answer is: "We'll chat about it after the session is over." And then: "It accurately models the setting you are playing in to gameable levels of precision. The desired result is _foo. Did you have a better way to achieve the effect?"

Dear lord. You should know to never open that door. Players will suffocate you with campaign suggestions, criticisms, changes, modifications, and somehow drift into comments about your wardrobe and mother.
If the GM's screen is out, the give a crap bag is emptied, and players play. :)

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Beware, poor communication skills. No offense intended. If offended, it just means that I failed my writing skill check.

Heh. My default answer is: "We'll chat about it after the session is over." And then: "It accurately models the setting you are playing in to gameable levels of precision. The desired result is _foo. Did you have a better way to achieve the effect?"

I always try to make sure my houserules are justified before I let the players know about them.

As for the talents, it can definitely cover places that are less or more broad than Wildcard skills.

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Quote:

Originally Posted by cosmicfish

While I do not think that GURPS is perfect I do think that it is more balanced than what I am likely to create by GM fiat.

I mean, er... I was thinking about this some more tonight on the long bus ride home from class.

Someone with reservations similar to Not's - i.e. that this is just a way to make bulk skill buys cheaper, which isn't GURPS-like - may or may not be satisfied if they consider a talent as being similar to IQ or DX (Only for certain skills, -X%). Interestingly, the cost of IQ! or DX! (both 15, with my IQ increase) -80% is 3. Add 1-2 for reaction bonus and faster learning and you get a minimum of 4-5 CP/level for a Talent, which is about the same as the existing floor.

Also, just for fun, let's say for the sake of argument that no one character is going to use ALL the skills, even if they make a DX or IQ monster. As an abstraction, let's say they'll only get use out of half of them. That gives us about 66 IQ skills, for a cost of 17/level, and about 41 DX skills, for a cost of 13/level. Compare those costs to IQ! (with the price increase) and DX! and I think they're fairly close to reasonable values for high tech games. For low tech games, IQ is less valued by players (except to pump spells), but there are also a lot less useful/extant mundane IQ skills, so it still matches up.

Magic has, what, something like 650 spells? That'd be about 50/level as a Talent. While this number is likely to cause sticker shock, it's hard to deny that it's probably worth that much to have a highly skilled mage with a large repertoire of spells. Applying the same "only half are useful" logic as in the previous paragraph would give us a cost of 37/level... still high, but again, powerful mages in GURPS approach brokenness, so this is probably pretty fair. Someone wanting to use this Talent pricing for magic might want to split the spells up into colleges...

Reducing the cost of large Talents makes taking them, or taking a couple of Talents, more feasible. But taking, say, 4 different Talents is still probably a bad deal. The way Talents are used now, this is probably a good thing, since you're not supposed to have several broad areas of expertise - buy IQ or DX for that. OTOH, using Talents this way would make it possible to support more of a "multiple intelligence" model; you could create Talents for melee combat, fine dexterity, whole-body agility, social intelligence, technical competence, and so forth, and then each character's aptitudes would be at least partly defined by several overlapping Talents instead of by their base attributes, allowing differentiation where buying up pure attributes doesn't (and discouraging the "all our PCs have IQ 13" problem). Yes, some of these aptitudes are already covered by existing advantages; this would be another way to make someone particularly (dexterous, social, whatever).

I'm not sure I would use this even in my own games, but the way I envision it working is this: add together all the skills covered by one level of Talent and calculate the cost as in the OP. (Note that under this scheme, skills that are covered by more than one Talent don't stack, and you only count them once no matter how many times they appear; this is a change from RAW Talent rules, which do stack skills.) Next, add together all the skills in Talents for which you have a second level, find that cost, and so on, until all levels of Talent are accounted for. Annoying, but you only have to do it once.

For those who like the idea of breaking out Will and Per into separate attributes, the multi-Talent idea plays along pretty nicely, since raising an "aptitude" doesn't raise secondary attributes anyway!

I think the idea here is that all skills are equally useful. Or that half of them are equally useful and the other half are all completely useless.

There probably is a point here where this evens out for at least some games, so you can get something that works for +1 to all skills. But as soon as you start allowing players to choose which skills to add, they're always going to pick the best ones.

That means you can either give a fair price for the good skills and leave the bad skills overpriced or you can give a fair price for the bad skills and give a huge discount on the good skills.

If you're going to price all skills the same, there's a choice to make: charge way more for the bad skills than they're worth, or charge way less for the good skills than other equally good non-skill options. You're either going to discourage characters with bad skills or encourage characters to load up on good skills instead of other options.

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"For the rays, to speak properly, are not colored. In them there is nothing else than a certain power and disposition to stir up a sensation of this or that color." —Isaac Newton, Optics